Make front end shit again • Hacker News Board

Re: Make front end shit again

#191

Post by terramex » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:09 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #185

terramex wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda finished my personal space: https://hackernews.hypertext.town/~kuba I didn't touch any web development in at least 10 years so it was a lot of fun. I hope even more interesting towns will appear!

Nice! I regret to report though, but something is broken - nothing above the SUPERHOT videos section is clickable :(.

Ah, of course copy pasting random CSS snippets from internet isn't good idea. Who knew?

Just fixed it, I had invisible div over whole page.

Re: Make front end shit again

#192

Post by thisrod » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

zeusk wrote: post #132

madeofpalk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the Bloomberg tech site, which had a lot of effort put into its 'brutalist' design to look like a 1995-era web page.

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/404 https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/500 https://www.bloomberg.com/500 Their error pages are still quite funny (and epic shit).

Crikey is good too:

https://www.crikey.com.au/zxy

Re: Make front end shit again

#193

Post by headsoup » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

citricsquid wrote: post #35

A few months ago I created a project called Hypertext Town, a simple project where anybody can create "camps" (a collection of HTML, images etc.) and connect them together through "towns". A town lives at a subdomain (e.g: town.hypertext.town) and a camp lives at /~camp (e.g: town.hypertext.town/~camp). I never "launched" it so it's just been languishing in obscurity on the www but if anybody wants to make cute littl…

Schools should do this, let their kids explore the joys of building their own personal online space, rather than the branded and conformed offerings they'll likely use instead (FB, Google, Pinterest, etc)

Re: Make front end shit again

#194

Post by ironjunkie » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

What happened in between is that the Multi-Billion startup guys took over.

Now the web is the place for yet another pizza delivery startup with a super slick frontend. Websites are made industrially mainly to sell. All the big platforms took over. There is no place anymore for small self-hosted websites (or at least those are extremely rare)

Call me cynical, which is probably true, but I remember the time when the web was the playground of the geeks. Now it feels like it became the playground of business majors.

Re: Make front end shit again

#195

Post by mr_toad » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:45 AM UTC

wolco wrote: post #177

whack wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that we complicate so many shit today that is not needed Isn't your site making the opposite point? That without all the "complicated shit that is not needed", websites would look as awful as they did in the 1990s. Any website-maker is of course free to make their site as "shit" as they want, but 99% of users are not going to visit it a 2nd time.

Sites that were pixel perfect photoshop exports looked better than the basic look we have now. Designers had more freedom to reproduce high res designs. Mobile forced us to get simplier and everyone uses a framework now. Designing feel more restricted and difficult.

They only ever looked pixel perfect in one browser on one OS in a 1200x800 window. For everyone else, they broke.

Re: Make front end shit again

#196

Post by krapp » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:48 AM UTC

ironjunkie wrote: post #194

What happened in between is that the Multi-Billion startup guys took over. Now the web is the place for yet another pizza delivery startup with a super slick frontend. Websites are made industrially mainly to sell. All the big platforms took over. There is no place anymore for small self-hosted websites (or at least those are extremely rare) Call me cynical, which is probably true, but I remember the time when the we…

About 140,000 websites are added to the internet every day, though.

Are you sure it's actually true that most of those sites are multi-billion dollar startups with super-slick frontends and that almost no one makes self-hosted sites anymore, or is it more likely that the web has gotten large enough that non-commercial, non SEO-driven sites are simply harder to notice?

The "big platforms" are still a rounding error in terms of the total content on the web.

The web isn't like old network television where there are a limited number of channels and limited number of slots for content. It hasn't moved from being the playground of geeks to business majors, but the playground of geeks to everyone, including, yes, the business majors.

Re: Make front end shit again

#197

Post by krapp » Mon, May 14, 2018, 1:54 AM UTC

AriaMinaei wrote: post #54

Web pages used to be amazingly creative, with terrible usability. Now they're the exact opposite. Usability is good, but they all look the same. I wonder what social sciences have to say about this. About public opinion swinging from one extreme to the other, never seeming to be able to land on the sane middle.

Let's take the nostalgia goggles off though... the old web was more colorful, certainly less uniform, but I wouldn't call it "amazingly creative." Most of those sites tended to look a lot alike as well, especially on Geocities.

Re: Make front end shit again

#198

Post by ibudiallo » Mon, May 14, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #181

ibudiallo wrote: post #109

I once read a comment here on HN about SEO, and someone was suggesting to start by buying a domain name that is your first and last name. I thought it was cool, but didn't see how it could improve SEO. But I bought it anyway[1]. I had nothing to put on it for a while, so I started just working on my own design skills replicating Google.com. It just a fun thing I do for absolutely no benefits to others. Great way of l…

Really like this! Do you update it when Google make changes?

Thanks! I will be on the look out for google changes to update accordingly.

Re: Make front end shit again

#199

Post by phendrenad2 » Mon, May 14, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

Personal websites served two purposes:

1) You could write about whatever you were interested in.

2) You could share things you had found on the web with others.

These days, (1) has been superseded by YouTube and Facebook groups, and (2) has been superseded by Wikipedia/Google/YouTube.

Re: Make front end shit again

#200

Post by exikyut » Mon, May 14, 2018, 4:12 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #68

weber111 wrote: post #4

Clicking around a little on the OP site's gallery led me to http://blog.geocities.institute/ and, in particular, to the post on the front page as of today, "9/11 and Vernacular Web" http://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5983 , which catalogs Geocities pages updated on 9/11. Pretty haunting.

Last week I was looking at an old CD-ROM of photos taken by a survey crew in the buildings around Ground Zero in the first few days after the attack. It was startling to see how many messages various people had written in the thick dust that covered everything. The most common message was one word: "Revenge!"

Now that would be genuinely interesting to have a look through.